Buhari acknowledged first Nigerian President to institutionalise poverty reduction programme
By OUR REPORTER
The Buhari Media Organisation (BMO) has hailed President Muhammadu Buhari for being the first Nigerian President to take concrete steps to institutionalise a national poverty reduction agenda with the National Social Investment Programme Establishment Bill, 2022.
The group said in a statement signed by its Chairman Niyi Akinsiju and Secretary Cassidy Madueke that failure to check the tide was a major reason the nation’s poverty figure rose beyond 112 million in 2012 inspite of high oil revenue at that time.
“When the Buhari administration introduced the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) in 2016,
it was with a view to tackling the country’s high rate of poverty which was 112m as at 2012, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
“At the time, the country had no known social welfare programme except for the one-size fits all initiative of the Peoples Democratic Party PDP through which commercial tricycles were handed over to some Nigerians under the ambit of the National Poverty Alleviation Programme (NAPEP).
“But today, six years after the NSIP was launched with multiple initiatives targeting different categories of Nigerians, the programme is now on the verge of being institutionalized as part of continuing efforts to take 100m Nigerians out of poverty by 2030.
“We see it as a great step which will give legal backing to an initiative that has been described as the largest welfare scheme in sub-saharan Africa, in a country that has never seen any deliberate and coordinated effort to lift millions of people out of the cycle of poverty”, the statement added.
BMO noted that the social investment bill was the outcome of a well thought-out process aimed at ensuring the continuity and sustainability of Nigeria’s first real social welfare scheme.
“What many people may not realize is that the NSIP has four programmes; namely the N-POWER Programme, the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP), the National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP) and the Conditional Cash Transfer Programme (CCT), all designed to cater for different categories of Nigerians in the bottom rung of the social ladder.
“We make bold to say that since the launch of NSIP in 2016, no fewer than five million Nigerians have benefitted from the four initiatives which independent monitors have since confirmed to be real.
“It is good to know that this pro-poor bill, if passed into law as expected, makes it mandatory for NSIP to be funded through a budgetary allocation and 5% of recovered and repatriated funds”.
The group also added that aside from the NSIP bill, the Buhari administration also has in place a National Poverty Reduction Strategy put together by the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC).
